Middle-school football coach dismissed over plan to take boys to Hooters

This football season will be the last for an Oregon middle school coach determined to hold a team victory bash at Hooters, the restaurant best known for its scantily clad waitresses, a school official said on Tuesday.

Randy Burbach, who concluded a successful season at Corbett Middle School near Portland, will not be invited back to coach next year after he refused to change his team's victory party location despite complaints from parents, the school district's athletic director said.

"When the term Hooters is thrown out there, what comes to mind is scantily clad young ladies who wear tight shorts and tight shirts," said Corbett Athletics Director Jean-Paul Soulagnet. "I think there are more appropriate places to take middle school boys."

Soulagnet said he asked Burbach, a volunteer coach who is paid a small stipend for his role, to change the location of the end-of-season celebration after receiving complaints from parents who felt Hooters was an inappropriate place for middle school boys, but Burbach refused.

"He dug in his heels about where he wanted to have it," Soulagnet said.

Soulagnet sent out an email on Monday night notifying parents that the school would no longer host the football event and that Burbach would not be allowed to return to coach another season at the school.

Burbach told Reuters that his team overwhelmingly chose Hooters in September as the destination for the party, and that he wasn't notified until Sunday that anyone had complained about the venue.

"I've spent this whole season teaching these kids that if you get knocked down, stand up and fight," Burbach said. "That's why I refuse to move the venue at the 11th hour."

Burbach said he didn't regularly patronize Hooters but that he had once brought his sons to the restaurant, which bills itself as "delightfully tacky yet unrefined," when they were 12 and that it had been a "positive experience."